Tycoon Release 0.5.2

[Kevin Lai]

I'm pleased to announce the release of version 0.5.2 of Tycoon. This
version consists of the work of several developers over sixteen months
and over 700 revisions. Contributors include Savio Fernandes, Roman
Kurakin, Kevin Lai, and Thomas E. Sandholm.

The changes in this version are focused on improving the scalability
and stability of the system while upgrading to new version of various
components like Xen 3.0. The key new features:

1) Support for Xen 3.0. This version is significantly more robust and
efficient than previous versions.

2) New bank and bank protocol. There is a new bank implementation and
associated bank protocol that closes several security holes and scales
to more uses. The bank server itself is not part of this release and
will be released within a few weeks.

3) The ability to request file system image from a remote URL. Users
can ask the auctioneer to use a file system image downloaded from a
url to create user accounts.

4) Support for creating accounts with multiple CPUs.

The current plan in 2008 largely depends on what the user community is
interested in. The tentative roadmap http://tycoon.hpl.hp.com/roadmap
includes work on improved testing, documentation, and ease-of-use.

Upgrading
=====================================================================

Be sure to backup important data from inside your host accounts before
doing any upgrades. This version is mostly command line compatible
with earlier versions, but not protocol compatible. As a result, you
should upgrade your clients and resource providers at the same time.

Version 0.5.2 is in the Tycoon yum repository, so upgrade by doing

$ yum -y update
$ service tycoon_aucd restart

We have made every effort to automatically upgrade existing host
accounts. However, there may be situations where the new Auctioneer
fails at this. The least intrusive solution is to use "tycoon host
delete_account" to delete the problematic account and then "tycoon
host create_account" to re-create it. If that doesn't work, you may
have to stop the Auctioneer, "rm -fr /home/{username}", restart the
Auctioneer, and have users recreate their host accounts.

Remaining Issues
==============================================================

1) As mentioned earlier, this version is not network protocol
compatible with earlier versions, so you should try to upgrade
both your clients and resource providers at the same time.